5/13/12

Celebrate Your Mentors this Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all of the mentors who have been patient with raising, teaching, and cheering on us young sprites! "Thank you," can never be said enough.

Mom & me.

In celebration, here are a few posts that speak to your guidance as well as that of my mother, New York psychologist Mary Jo Wilson PhD.:

Quiet Games and Activities for Children with ADHD
“Odd, isn't it, how, as they gain experience, the senses become blunted. One must keep them up by making a game of it, like the boy, Kim, in Kipling. Do you enjoy Kipling?”
-A Study in Sherlock, “You’d Better Go in Disguise” by Alan Bradley (pg. 5).
When I was a kid, puzzles fascinated me. Our family’s living room was matted with them. As my mother, Mary Jo Wilson PhD, attested to, this discovery came as relief. It added another activity that captured my full attention for hours at a time...

ADHD Kids: Nurture their Strengths, Value their Weaknesses
“Other teens echo the sentiment of 12-year-old Marty Priors, who finds that ADHD ‘is just another way to say that people are bad.’ In fact, he thinks the letters ADD stand for ‘adult deficit disorder…in fact, Marty voices another myth that skeptics and critics use as a way to make their points: that the kids are fine and that ADHD is nothing more than a child’s failure to meet adult expectations.”
-Mary Fowler, Maybe You Know My Teen (pg. 26)
In childhood, we learn that many of the habits that accompany ADHD are inappropriate or else uncooperative. These lessons are taught by teachers who fear a chaotic classroom, or parents without the time or patience to manage a child’s energy, or worse yet, psychiatrists who prescribe medication without fostering the proper tools and insights to direct their patients’ unique ways of interacting with the world.

On my contempt for reading…
“Follow your bliss.”
–Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth.
I hate reading. At least, I used to hate reading. I would sit for hours puzzling over words, trying to understand something more complicated than my young brain could manage. I was an elementary school student with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

How has your mother supported your struggles with ADHD? Comment below, email me at WriteToJulianna, or share your memories with your mother today (or any day for that matter)!